Xu Yi's Incense Beads were inside his Starry Sky Ring, and Huang Mei lived in the Starry Sky Ring too. Getting his hands on the Incense Beads would have been no trouble at all.
The key was that making contact was one thing; getting them and refining them was another.
Xu Yi's consciousness could envelop the entire Starry Sky Ring at any time, making it exceedingly difficult to move around inside.
His only chance was to wait until Xu Yi was fast asleep, then get his hands on the Incense Beads. But that raised the question of how to refine them.
If he refined them inside the Starry Sky Ring, Xu Yi would surely wake, no matter how deeply he was sleeping.
After much deliberation, Huang Mei came up with a plan.
At its heart, the plan still involved refining the Incense Beads outside the ring.
But slipping out of the Starry Sky Ring without Xu Yi noticing was the crucial part.
There were two obstacles to keeping Xu Yi from noticing. First, if Xu Yi woke and realized he was gone, he would grow suspicious, and Huang Mei would be exposed.
Second, he had to slip out of the Starry Sky Ring as quietly as possible—almost without a trace.
For anyone else, both would have been all but impossible. But Huang Mei had a chance of pulling it off.
In fact, Huang Mei really had succeeded. Right under Xu Yi's nose, he had managed it seven times.
This was how it went: whenever he was about to act, he would wait until Xu Yi was fast asleep. Then Huang Mei would spit out a corpse puppet and make it look like himself, leaving it there pretending to sleep.
Then came the crucial part. His body would turn into an